As I’m sitting here typing this, I’m stuffing my face with a large bowl of vanilla ice cream. It’s a fitting end to a gorgeous day when we’ve enjoyed unbroken sunshine from dawn to dusk and a temperature of over 30 degrees Celsius. The forecast was for only 28 degrees but when I nipped out in the car just after 7.00 pm it was still showing that and the evening had already begun to cool down a bit. I spent the whole day working outside on the X-Air panel wearing just swimming trunks and although I’ve caught the sun, I don’t feel as though I’ve been burned. I think it’s still a bit too early for that, but I could be wrong.
I’d hoped to get the panel all wired up today but it didn’t happen. The main reason for that was that I’m re-using old switches etc that were previously soldered. This is always a problem – new items can be soldered in much more quickly in comparison – but this isn’t what rather annoyed me. That was because whoever wired up the old panel soldered almost everything when it wasn’t really necessary. And that wouldn’t be so bad either except they didn’t do a very good job. So switch terminals that could have accepted blade connectors have enormous lumps of solder on them, and where terminals have been bridged across there are lumps of ugly bare wire. If the terminals in question weren’t common earths, this would be totally unacceptable, of course. But before I started, I thought I’d see how the panel will look when placed in position in the aircraft.
I did the best I could but progress was not as fast as I would have liked. I eventually got to the point when I wanted to solder the leads from two LEDs onto a common earth on one of the mag switches when I had to admit defeat. My little 30W soldering iron just couldn’t supply enough heat to run the volume of solder and make the joint and to have continued might have resulted in damage to the switch. The solution will be to buy a 100W iron which I know I can get from Brico Depot for 7.95€ and that’s where I was going this evening before I decided that I might as well wait until tomorrow and buy an iron locally, and turned back for home.
When I arrived home, the evening was already beginning to cool a bit and while I was knocking up a spaghetti bolognese, this is what I spotted in my front garden.
That’s Aurelie and Benjamin’s cat Scratchie in my bird bath. I know there’s a bit of a thing about private swimming pools around her, but isn’t this taking things a bit too far? Actually, I think with today’s sun it was probably dry, but he’s still got a bit of a cheek, don’t you think 😕